Personalized Push Notifications - How And Why

by Darragh Smyth, 02 September 2015

There are many forms of personalization, but perhaps the one that springs most readily to mind for most of us is the simple insertion of specific personal information (such as a first name) into a communication such as an email or push notification.

It’s not necessarily the most effective or significant way in which experience can be personalized, but it is important to understand it is not purely limited to making a message ‘feel’ more personal. It can change the nature of the messages themselves.

Consider, for example, a travel app wishing to send a push notification advising users of new deals on a specific route they have previously looked at within the app. To send that message in a meaningful way - in other words quoting the relevant destination - would either require an awful lot of campaigns to be set up, or some form of personalization of the type we are talking about.

The Perils Of Personalization

Swrve does, of course, support this type of campaign, and we do so via a simple, easy-to-use UI that makes creating messages like this simple and fast. But we also take care to ensure that we handle the exceptions and avoid sending inaccurate or meaningless notifications when the data isn’t there.

That’s simple enough to do. Note the image above. In the first instance, the (Swrve) user is able to define a ‘fallback’ word or phrase to insert if a particular field does not have a value. Perhaps more importantly again is the option to not send the campaign at all to mobile users for whom there is no value of this particular type.

Taking that approach means that highly sophisticated and targeted campaigns can be delivered solely to those users who are relevant (ie, to continue the example, only those who have researched a destination), and those users who are not relevant will automatically be excluded from the campaign.

Just one aspect of the personalization challenge - handled with style by Swrve!